How to build a content strategy as a founder.
A good content strategy for founders puts your own stories, opinions and experience at the centre, shares them from your personal profile (where people are far more likely to see them), and plans them as a connected system so a single idea can travel across LinkedIn, email, your blog and Instagram without you starting from scratch each time. The sections below walk through how that works in practice, starting with why the personal side matters more than it used to.
Why your personal profile matters more than the company page.
On LinkedIn and Facebook, a personal profile tends to reach far more people than a company page does, and in my experience that gap shows up across accounts of every size. The reason is simple- people prefer people, and our feeds tend to reflect that. Think about the last time you enjoyed a post that opened with 'We're thrilled to announce' (a sentence I'm fairly sure nobody has ever said out loud over dinner), and then compare it with a post from someone you follow who shared what went wrong on a project and what they did next. A company page still has a job, which is to act as a shop window where people can check you're real, but the conversation happens on your own feed, so that's where a founder-led content strategy should spend most of its time.
Why your stories matter more now that AI writes so much.
Anyone can ask ChatGPT or Gemini for a month of LinkedIn posts in about 10 seconds now, which means feeds are filling up with content that could've come from anyone in your industry on any given Tuesday. (I mean, you shouldn’t, but people could…) What AI can't produce is your lived experience, so that's the raw material to build a strategy around. I'm a Xennial, for example, so I grew up with 4 TV channels and a walk to the phone box, then joined Facebook as an adult when it first arrived, and that in-between position shapes how I explain almost everything about the internet. (Go Goonies generation!)
A useful test is to take a draft and swap your name for a competitor's… if it still makes sense, an AI tool has no reason to cite you and a reader has no reason to remember you, because nothing in it belongs to you. Specific details make it yours, like the film that got you through a bad week or the client call that changed your mind about a pricing page. People have all the information they need a single prompt away now, so what they're choosing when they follow you is your way of making sense of it, and that comes from your viewpoint, your history and the stories only you can tell.
What to include in a founder content strategy.
A founder content strategy works best when it's built around 3 or 4 topics you want to be known for, and each topic gets looked at through the 3 C's- Connection, Credibility and Credentials.
Connection is your world, which covers your personality, your behind-the-scenes moments and the opinions you hold that have nothing to do with work. I'm a total Marvel fan, I love anything in the fantasy genre, and a bit of time travel makes it even better, which might put off the TikTokers who were cross about Deadpool (as if the earlier films weren't a clue) and also draws in the people who reply 'me too'.
Credibility is your thinking, meaning your professional opinions, what you notice in your industry and the sector conversations you join. Credentials is your work, so client results, talks, events and proof that doesn't need a lesson wrapped around it. On top of all 3 sits an invitation to work with you, which takes up roughly 10% of what you share so the soft ask is there without taking over. It's tempting to lean on Credentials because posting results feels safest, and a feed made entirely of proof reads like a brochure, so Connection and Credibility need a place in your content too.
How to plan your content as a connected system.
Once you know your topics, the next decision is where each idea will live, and I plan this as an ecosystem with 5 layers.
Anchor content is the long piece, such as a blog, newsletter or video, where you develop an idea in full- these are your meaty pieces!
Campaign content is a set of pieces built around a launch or a theme.
Bridge content connects your own thinking to conversations already happening in your sector with people you’d like your name associated with.
Snackable content covers the short posts, carousels and Stories that introduce ideas in a few seconds, and
reactive content is your response to something happening today- the bit that keeps you hyper relevant.
A single anchor piece can become a LinkedIn post, a newsletter, an Instagram caption and a handful of Stories, which means you do the thinking once and use it many times, and it also means that if you write an off-hand thread one day that takes off, you can use that viewpoint or topic and turn it into bigger bits of content.
I plan all of this in Notion, (although Asana, ClickUp and Trello work too), and it keeps a founder-led strategy sustainable because nobody wants to invent a fresh idea every morning before their first coffee. (Tea in my case.)
How to use AI without losing your voice.
AI is useful for structuring a draft, repurposing a long piece into shorter ones, and tidying up the awkward sentence you've been staring at since last week, so I'm all for using it as a drafting tool. But the personal layer needs you, which means adding the stories, opinions and specific details that only you have before anything gets published. (You might of course have this all added into your AI of choice, and get a pretty good draft… but I’d always recommend a human editor, and never automate publishing without that human eyeball on the copy.)
A practical way to do this is to keep a running note of the things you say in meetings and on calls (voice notes work well), then use those as the source material so the draft starts from your thinking. If you have your clients’ explicit permission to record sessions, that can work great too.
How to tell whether your content strategy is working.
Attention is the starting point, so what happens next decides whether it actually builds anything. A while back I binge-watched Lego Masters over Christmas, and on the Australian version Brickman Ryan gives builders a familiar piece of feedback- the scale got his attention, and the storytelling kept it. Posts work the same way, so it's worth planning what follows one that does well, such as replies to comments, Stories that add context and the next piece of content that shows how you think.
It’s also worth noting that some of the best signals never show up in analytics, and they include a quick reply someone almost didn't send, a Story that a person watches every day without reacting, and the message from someone who has followed you for months and finally says so. For that reason I look at the quality of engagement, the consistency of showing up, and whether the enquiries that arrive fit the work you want to do, and I treat follower growth as useful context, rather than the be all and end all.
Where to start this week.
A simple look at your content strategy could look like this:
Write down the things you can't stop talking about, whether they're business-related or not, because the one that surprises you is often your starting point. It doesn’t matter how good you think they are- this is your start point.
Choose 3 or 4 topics you want to be known for, and check each of them against the 3 C's.
Pick a single anchor piece (a blog, newsletter or video) and share it from your personal profile before you touch the company page.
If you're working out which of the 3 C's your own feed needs more of, pop me a message... I'd love to hear what you're working on.
